


Inhuman Beauty

by Stariceling



Category: Free!
Genre: Amputation, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Injury, M/M, Medical, Trauma, in which Rei is not a beautiful butterfly, trauma for everyone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 10:10:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15313248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stariceling/pseuds/Stariceling
Summary: Rei undergoes an unwanted metamorphosis thanks to Alien DNA while Nagisa struggles to hold him together.





	Inhuman Beauty

**Author's Note:**

> Bonus Round 1 (AU) prompt:
> 
> I guess vaguely based on Astronaut!Nagisa, but Scifi AU- Nagisa and Rei (and the rest of the Free! team if you'd like!) have gone on some kind of space mission where something goes wrong, and Rei is injured and infected with some kind of alien genetics which partially spread over his body (think: lite District 9). Nagisa has to reassure a normally beauty-obsessed Rei that he's still beautiful despite it.

The worst part was what happened to Rei’s spine. Nagisa had heard the bones crunching together, and Rei had spasmed and screamed in agony and eventually passed out.

When Nagisa checked for injury there was something growing out of his back. His skin had split and there were scales like shiny beetle shells jutting out. The skin around them was dry and stiff, like a callus, and Nagisa had a horrible vision of Rei’s entire skin molting off and a stranger climbing out of it.

Nagisa had been left alone a little too long, checking Rei’s vitals every few minutes and trying to work out a plan. If Rei didn’t get up again, if he couldn’t get up again, Nagisa had to find a way to get him home safely.

It was all he could do not to fling himself on Rei in relief when he finally opened his eyes. He confirmed Rei wasn’t paralyzed, helped Rei to his feet, and then latched onto him.

Rei was shorter. In the span of an hour the difference between their heights had been cut to less than half, and suddenly Nagisa was no longer poised to nuzzle at his favorite sensitive spot under Rei’s jaw.

The last time he’d been in Rei’s arms was shortly after they made it safely into the nesting complex. Maybe the wind had chewed away the foundation, because if felt like the entire building tilted, slid, and then crashed down flat again. Rei had grabbed him a second before one of the metal rods hung with curtains of eggs had come down on them. It had ripped though Rei’s suit and leave a bloody gash across his back.

There were other things to worry about than Rei’s height. Within half an hour he’d stripped Rei naked because his skin was peeling off and there was no stopping it. Nagisa had to keep cutting it because otherwise it would split down to areas of still-living skin and then it would bleed.

Rei wasn’t much help. He didn’t want to look at himself. He alternated between despair and bargaining. There must be something that would make it stop. What if he just sewed up what was left of his skin? What if they called for help? This must be why the Lepidopterans didn’t let humans in their nesting complexes.

Nagisa could apologize for dragging Rei off into space and to this planet and on this expedition, but he wasn’t going to regret that last step. There had been nowhere else to take shelter and they had no protective clothing that could prevent the sandstorms here from chewing flesh from bone.

“You shouldn’t have to look at me. I should go away where you don’t have to look at me anymore,” Rei whimpered at one point.

There was nowhere to go. There was the climate control room they had holed up in and six egg chambers around it, and leaving the building was certain death.

“Is that what you’d tell me to do if it was me? Go away where you don’t have to look at me?”

Rei wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Would you tell me to go outside so you don’t have to look at me again?”

“No! How could I say that to you?!”

“Then you’re not allowed to say it to yourself!” Nagisa latched on to Rei and clung. “If anything happened to you I’d destroy this whole planet and then myself.”

Rei hugged him back, which helped. “You can’t say that. Something already happened to me.”

“You know what I mean. If I lose my Rei-chan.”

Rei was silent. Nagisa stoked his hair, then stopped when he realized it was quickly falling out.

“Lepidopterans molt, don’t they? How long does that take?”

“Converted to our time: six hours eighteen minutes to eight hours forty-nine minutes. Approximately,” Rei answered with a crispness that said he had just done the conversion in his head. Too bad Nagisa didn’t have a pile of things like that to distract him with. Rei had been doing better when he was trying to invent a way to repair their connection to the subterranean cables and call for help without going outside and dying.

Nagisa lost track of the hours almost immediately as he helped Rei out of his skin, and sometimes more than skin. His feet split midway down while his toes went dead and sloughed off and Nagisa tried to focus on the fact that it wasn’t causing Rei pain and not the fact that he was taking away tendon and bone. The last joint of each finger went the same way, and when Nagisa got the dead skin off Rei’s hands had already split neatly between middle and ring fingers to allow for a type of dexterity he had no idea how to use.

Rei did try to help, but once his hands went stiff under dead skin and then changed, there wasn’t a lot he could do.

The sandstorm was a blessing in its own way because there was nothing else for Nagisa to focus on. If he’d had to split his attention with anything else he couldn’t have done it. He could focus on only Rei. He could keep doing the next thing and then the next until he finally peeled off the last pieces of what had been Rei’s face, and dimly realized that there was nothing left to do. He was looking at all of Rei for the first time in what felt like forever.

His new skin was iridescent blue-green. Up his spine and around his middle there were hard, oval scales, but on the rest of his skin they flowed together. Around his eyes and down his throat and chest the color darkened to a black that held rainbows in the light.

It felt like the change had taken a lot away and given nothing back. His toes and the outside part of his ears and most of his nose were gone. His chest had compressed upward and something was wrong there that Nagisa couldn’t figure out by touch, but the last few floating ribs had been shoved outward and threatened to pierce the skin. Several joints had reorganized themselves under his skin. Nagisa would catch a glimpse of Rei’s hands or knees when he moved and something in the back of his head jolted because knees should not bend like that.

Yet with all that he was still human-shaped. He still had only one pair each of knees and elbows, and only ten fingers. No feathery antennae curled up from the back of his head or fanned around his jaw. No bright wings folded against his sides and back. (Lepidopterans used them for communication rather than flying, but the name had stuck. Their word for humans was approximately “kkkn-flash lower set of wings-nnn” and Nagisa’s curiosity as to what that actually meant had gone unsatiated.)

Nagisa thought it was a great injustice in the universe that after all that Rei didn’t have wings.

“I can’t. . .” Rei had been tentatively looking at his own body, but he was shaking. He lifted a hand to his face as if to adjust his missing glasses and jerked it away again.

“What happened? Can you see?”

“I can’t close my eyes!” Rei cried in horror. He couldn’t cover them, either, with what had happened to his hands.

Nagisa cupped his hands over Rei’s face, at least to help him calm down.

“I’m hideous. I don’t even look like a Lepidopteran. I’m just this mangled thing.” Rei’s voice rose with an edge of hysteria. “I understand what you were trying to say, but I’m grotesque. I can’t even look at myself without feeling sick. How can you stand to look at me like that?”

“Like what? Like I love you?” Nagisa kissed his forehead. The new skin felt different, supple elastic over muscle, and it made him briefly curious about touching Rei in other places. For the moment he sat back and looked hard at Rei’s changed face for a few seconds to make sure he meant it when he said the words, “Or like you’re beautiful?”

“I am not.”

“Yes you are.”

“I cannot have his argument with you right now,” Rei cried.

“Good. That means I win.”

“It does not!”

“I win. You’re beautiful.”

If Rei had been in a different mood they could have gone around that way a couple more times, but he just gave a miserable moan.

“You’re a beautiful color. You’re all blue, and you shine in the light like a butterfly’s wing. Do you want to see?”

It took a few minutes to calm Rei to the point where he would agree to look, and much longer to introduce him to his new skin. Rei could tentatively appreciate the perfect iridescent sheen. And here and there where an old scar would have been there were bright veins like opal. They ran along his hands and between his fingers, which was the only reason he could stand to look at them. Introducing him to a mirror was not going to be a fun process.

Rei eventually subsided to the point where he would allow that he might not be the single worst horror to ever exist. He was probably still waiting for Nagisa to flinch away or cry, but Nagisa was momentarily engrossed in investigating the taut scales over his stomach versus the rippled skin stretched over his muscular chest verses his softer face.

“I’m sure there is no species in the galaxy that finds this attractive,” Rei said after a few minutes, as if testing out self loathing again.

“Fine. No alien’s going to steal my man!”

“You say that like you’re serious.”

Nagisa stared Rei in the eyes, daring him to doubt that Nagisa would fight someone, or everyone, over him.

Rei started laughing. There was a ragged edge to it, but it was a laugh nonetheless. He rested his forehead on Nagisa’s shoulder and laughed and gasped and stuttered into a laugh again.

Nagisa was going to let him catch his breath before saying anything, but Rei beat him to it.

“I wouldn’t let anyone ‘steal’ me.”

“Not even if we found a civilization that thinks you’re so beautiful they decide you’re a god?”

“That is not going to happen. But in the completely impossible event it did, no. You wouldn’t either, right?”

“I would tell everyone you’re my beautiful consort and should be treated like a god too.”

“You would, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course!”

Rei laughed again, like the weary sound of a cyborg winding down, and finally asked, “Now what?”

“Wait until it’s safe and go back to the ship?” Somewhere in there was the question of if Rei could stand and walk, and if his protective clothing would still fit him well enough.

At some point Nagisa would have to acknowledge the places where Rei’s skin was stiffening like a beetle’s wing covers. If they shattered into stained glass wings, at least that was the one change that shouldn’t traumatize Rei too badly.

Nagisa took his hands away from the possible wings. Rei was still alive and upright and trying to talk calmly about how they would locate and reach the ship if it was buried, and Nagisa truly loved every last inch of him.

Right now, Nagisa didn’t know how many more pieces of Rei he could stand to lose.


End file.
